For love of Lagaan

By Bettie Gray Sentinel staff

If you like cricket, you'll love Lagaan. If you like long (more than three hours), subtitled, Victorian-era, Indian love stories punctuated with large doses of song and dance, you'll love Lagaan. And if you aren't attracted to any of these particular features? You'll still love this Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Film of 2001 (now available on DVD and videotape). (see www.lagaan.indiatimes.com.)

"Once upon a time in India," the film begins, in 1893, during the time of the British Raj, the people of the little farming village of Champaner "in the heart of India" suffered a terrible blow—the threat of a doubled land tax (lagaan in Hindi) to pay to the British, who lived and ruled in their midst. Lagaan, paid out in portions of the villagers' rice, maize, and wheat crops, was already cruel enough to these peasants, who never knew how it felt to have enough to eat. But double lagaan? Unthinkable. To make matters even worse, a relentless drought, unbroken by "Love's rain,"—as the villagers refer to it in one of their songs—had left a veneer of dust over their hope.

Enter the village hero, Bhuvan. Bhuvan's impertinence toward the British cantonment's Captain Russell, coupled with the local rajah's refusal to depart from his religious beliefs and eat meat (because Captain Russell "wants to see him do it") gives rise to a challenge. The villagers must play a game of cricket against the British. If they win, there will be no tax for three years for the entire region. If they lose, they must pay triple lagaan.

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